The Need

 

Despite the negative impact air pollution on human health, the economy, and the environment, the number of air pollution monitoring stations is very limited due to the high capital cost per station. Typically, a small number of expensive monitoring stations are installed in cities for collecting high-quality air data.

The awareness of the citizens around air quality means that it is no longer acceptable to consider an air reference site located 10 kms away as having any relevance to the air they are breathing.

For this reason, low-cost air pollution sensors are attracting more and more attention among institutions and citizens: they offer air pollution monitoring at a lower cost than conventional methods, in theory making air pollution monitoring possible in many more locations.

However, the current accuracy of the low-cost electrochemical sensors is low because they are sensitive to several pollutants and to different factors such as temperature, relative humidity or sensibility degradation.

The Solution

 

Bettair® is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that permits, for the first time, to map air pollution in cities on a previously unimaginable scale based on a large deployment of outstandingly accurate gas sensors by using an advanced post-processing algorithm.

The MappingAir project aims to further develop this novel technology in order to become a market-ready product, capable of interconnecting with smart city platforms (Cisco Kinetic) as well as smart energy devices (Omniled). The performance of the Narrowband IoT connectivity will be tested together with TIM. New features will be added, including forecasting and an APP for citizens to access the data in a friendly manner and find less polluted routes for walking, running and biking.

Four different pilots in different cities will be carried out in order to test the technology in the field under different scenarios with different weather conditions and demonstrate its benefits.

The Benefits

 

The network of autonomous devices is installed in streetlights (or similar) in a dense matrix and assist cities to:

  • identify unknown pollution sources
  • assess the impact of different environmental actions to identify the most effective ones
  • recommend specific local actions
  • identify and categorize zones per air quality
  • recommend the cleanest routes
  • plan civil works on the most appropriate dates and timetables
  • compare and identify the best urban topologies from he prospective of air quality

The APP will allow citizens to better understand the quality of the air they breathe every day, in a simple and user-friendly display, together with the best route available for going from A to B avoiding high level of air pollution.